The days of a traditional telephone company providing only telephone service have, in large part, given way to telecommunications companies that provide a much wider variety of services. Some examples of these services include providing entertainment choices, such as television programming and movies, wireless communications, and Internet service, among others. Along with these new services comes greater support needs and a greater amount of data to be managed by the telecommunications companies.
In addition to providing a wide variety of services, many telecommunications companies provide their services across the country and are supported by operations in many different locations. Service locations may be set up in any number of configurations, such as by region, state, city, or any other geographic or non-geographic organization. Some locations may be service centers where problem reports are collected and responded to by technicians, while other locations may be call centers taking orders for new services. Each location may store some or all of the information needed in various data repositories in order to perform tasks for which the location is responsible. However, from an overall company perspective, all of the data relating to the business should be collected and processed into meaningful information.
Data may be generated in several ways. Orders for new service and repair requests for existing service may be entered directly into a system by a call operator who is an employee or contractor for the telecommunications company. More recently, orders and repair requests are commonly being entered directly by customers over the Internet.
Some of the meaningful information that can be generated from the data involves the attributes of the tasks related to service order and trouble ticket data (or simply, “ticket data”). Currently, source data repositories may be located anywhere on a network. The data repositories may be specific to the location and contain certain information related to the function of the location. In order to compile attribute metrics, separate queries are run on each of the separate data repositories each time a report is generated. This may be performed by accessing data stored in multiple data repositories and can be quite time consuming.
Additionally, the reports that are generated often use business logic that is hard coded in scripts on a reporting system. If a change is made for one report, it can frequently be overlooked on another. Also, if some logic changes, many times there are multiple locations that need to be changed in order for the logic to propagate correctly. This duplicated effort is not only burdensome, but can be error prone.